The modern-day grind leaves no room for sleep. Who needs it anyway? We have coffee to keep us as productive as we need to be, right? Wrong.
Sleep does a whole lot more than keep us bright and bushy-tailed when the AM rolls around. If you think that more than 6 hours of sleep is for slackers, and it serves no real value to your productivity or mental health, I am here to let science prove you wrong.
Experts suggest that sleep deprivation and poor sleep can affect our attention, goal-oriented tasks, emotional processing, and overall mental health.
What happens in the brain when you don’t get enough sleep?
Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs from elementary school? A lot has changed since 1943, but this theory hasn’t. Sleep is a basic physiological need at the very bottom of the pyramid, along with water and food. (2)
If you aren’t getting sleep, forget about the rest of your needs. Everything is getting overshadowed by your dire need for sleep.
Matthew Walker is a leading neurologist, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley and recently wrote the increasingly popular book Why We Sleep.
In his book and throughout his research, Matthew has shown that a sleepy brain and body result in more illness, mental health issues, and other medical problems.
Around 40% of people report a less than optimal or short sleep duration. (3) Sleeping under a minimum of seven hours of sleep has a significant impact on the wakeful hours of our day.
Lack of sleep affects our attention, working memory, reward and incentive processing, memory, aversive stimuli response, and emotional discrimination and expression. (4)
Interrupted Attention makes it Harder to Perform Tasks
Getting less sleep than your body needs can hugely impact how well you perform tasks the next day. After a night of sleep deprivation, people can experience impairments of attention called “microsleeps” or “lapses.” These impairments make it difficult to maintain focus, which causes unstable task performance. (4, 7)
Microsleeps can look something like this. You are focused on completing an excel spreadsheet at work. At first, you sustain focus. After a short time, you completely lose track of what you were doing. Once you catch the attention slip up, you reestablish your focus. After a few moments, you are right back in a lost state of distraction, and the cycle repeats itself.
When performing almost any task, loss of focus can increase completion time and affect the overall quality of work. In layman’s terms, lack of sleep equals some seriously frustrating lack of productivity.
Lack of Sleep Disrupts Emotional Processing
The amygdala is a structure in the brain that processes emotions and plays an integral part in feelings like anxiety and depression.
Trait anxiety is the stable tendency to feel negative emotions, like anxiety and fear, across a broad spectrum of situations. This type of anxiety is different from state anxiety, which appears only in specific conditions. A large number of studies show a correlation between trait anxiety and greater amygdala reactivity. (8)
Amygdala reactivity is essential when it comes to emotional processing and sleep deprivation. Just one night of sleep deprivation resulted in a 60% increase of amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli, like weapons or spiders. (5) Sleep deprivation may cause a sense of emotional hypersensitivity and prevents emotional reactivity from being analyzed correctly. (6)
Lack of sleep equals increased reactivity to things that already cause anxiety and may cause heightened reactivity to things that previously didn’t cause anxiety. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need any additional challenges when it comes to processing emotional information.
Increased Importance of Quality Sleep for People with Anxiety and Depression
Chronic sleep problems affect 50% to 80% of patients in a typical psychiatric practice. (10) Harvard reports that “Sleep problems are particularly common in patients with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).” (10)
Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health disorders globally. The World Health Organization estimates that 322 million people suffer from depression, and 264 million people suffer from anxiety globally. (12)
Insomnia, trouble falling asleep, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping are common symptoms of those suffering from anxiety and depression. It may be beneficial to place additional importance for sufferers on maintaining a healthy and optimal sleep routine.
Walker suggests that natural sleep routines are best since pharmacological sedatives and alcohol interfere with sleep quality. (11)
Optimal 7 to 9 Hours of Sleep a Night
The National Sleep Foundation recommends 7 to 9 hours of sleep for adults aged 18 to 64. (9) This recommendation was developed during intensive rounds of voting by six sleep experts and health experts after reviewing numerous studies on sleep and health.
I have had countless conversations with friends, family, and coworkers who believe that they have some alien ability to function fully on less sleep. Who am I to tell you otherwise? I will let science do the talking.
A generously estimated 3% of the population can get by on less than 6 hours of sleep, according to neurology professor Ying-Hui Fu. (1) A gene mutation, identified by Fu, allows for this rare human trait.
To fully understand the rarity of this percentage, only 1% more of the entire human population has natural born red hair. So the short answer is yes, Aunt Sarah, you may be one rare individual who is fully functioning at under 6 hours of sleep. More likely than not, you live like the rest of us where 7 to 9 hours a night is a must.
Rest easy knowing that the additional time you spend sleeping above 6 hours is adding to your abilities to stay on task and be productive during wakeful hours. Proper sleep also helps you have higher functionality in processing emotions and interacting with others.
